Matthew Desmond Quotes
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If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.
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We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.
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Kids increase people's risk of eviction.
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I think there are ways that graduate students can fact-check their work. I think there are ways that we can do this that don't require massive amounts of resources.
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Eviction causes loss. You lose not only your home but also your possessions, which are thrown onto the curb or taken by movers, and often you can't keep up payments.
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If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.
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The standard of 'affordable' housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family's income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent.
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Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike.
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I saw people get fired after their eviction. But when I found that if you get evicted, your chances of losing your job increase by 20 percent, that's when it really hit home for me.
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I think I've read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called 'The Philadelphia Negro'. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data.
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Arguably, the families most at need of housing assistance are systematically denied it because they're stamped with an eviction record. Moms and kids are bearing the brunt of those consequences.
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When we think of entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare immediately come to mind. But by any fair standard, the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction - an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable.
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A lot of people didn't know just what eviction does to people, how it really sets their life on a different and much more difficult path, acting not like a condition of poverty but a cause of it.
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When you meet people who are spending 70, 80 percent of their income on rent, eviction becomes much more of an inevitability than the result of personal irresponsibility.
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A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its ability to work together to change the community and change their lives.
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In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective.
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When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?
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When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.
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'Sag Harbor' brought me a new readership - it's a coming of age tale about growing up in the '80s.
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If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability.
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Eviction comes with a record. Just like a criminal record can hurt you in the jobs market, eviction can hurt you in the housing market. A lot of landlords turn folks away who have an eviction, and a lot of public housing authorities do the same.
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When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level.
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Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities.
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Since the publication of 'Evicted', I have had countless conversations with concerned families across America. Teachers in under-served communities have told me about high classroom turnover rates, which hinder students' ability to reach their full potential.